Biometric Recognition Technologies in Schools

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones for instigating this very important and in fact fundamental debate about the use of biometric technology in schools. I also thank Pippa King from Biometrics in Schools, Jen Persson of Defend Digital Me, and Dr Stephanie Hare, for discussing with me some of the fundamental issues.

As a society, we are putting the cart before the horse if we talk about the technology and how it should be deployed in schools as an automatic assumption. The marketing departments of these companies are leading the debate, not the legislators, if we start from that assumption. To put it in its simplest and most understandable way, we are having this debate to ask whether it is acceptable for us as a society to use a child’s face as a proxy purse or wallet to pay for a bag of chips or a slice of pizza in a state school, to solve a problem that does not exist, namely reducing queuing times by five seconds. This debate is not about technology; it is about the use of a child in terms of the autonomy of that child’s body.

This debate is very fundamental. It is a debate about where we, as a society, draw the line in the use of technology—not about what we do once it is deployed but what the limitations of it are before we start talking about how it is regulated. Where do we draw the line? This cannot be left to individual schools or councils. It is for this Parliament to legislate and to decide where we draw that line. As a nation we need to see where the limitations of its use are and where it should not be deployed, and then to regulate in areas where we feel that it is unacceptable.

If we leave it to individual schools, the unintended consequences and problems that will arise will be not just technical but deeply ethical and societal. There must be a balanced debate within this Parliament and legislation must be brought forward. We have seen the unintended consequences in live facial recognition use by the police when the marketing teams and the technology gets ahead of the legislation. We talk then about the lack of regulation, rather than first talking about where it is acceptable and unacceptable and we start seeing that, as the technology leads, people’s rights are trampled on and we try to play catch-up.

The Department for Education has no idea what the current situation is. An FOI request from the campaigning work by Pippa King of Biometrics in Schools highlights this. On 28 July, the DfE replied to an FOI request:

“The DfE does not hold any information on standards or specifications of any hardware or software in biometric technology used in UK schools ... The DfE does not hold any information about suppliers that provide biometric technology to schools ... The DfE does not hold any information about the types of biometrics that are used in schools, i.e. fingerprints, facial recognition, palm, vein or iris scanning.”


What is the point of giving out guidance if the department has no idea what is going on in schools? The guidance is not worth the paper it is written on if the DfE is not policing what is going on.

Current advice to schools, issued by the Department for Education on the use of biometric technology, is out of date. As my noble friend Lord Clement- Jones said, it dates from March 2018. It still cites the Data Protection Act 1998, not the GDPR or the Data Protection Act 2018, and its contents focus on the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 and the processing of fingerprints. It says absolutely nothing about facial recognition technology.

Can I ask the Minister, whom I admire for stepping in at the last moment, why the 2018 guidance is out of date? What has it not been updated and why is there no guidance whatever on facial recognition in schools? On such an important issue, why does the Department for Education not have some form of monitoring what is happening? Where do the Government draw the line on what is an acceptable use of this technology in schools and on young people below the age of 18?

It does not have to be like this. There are places around the world which have legislated. In 2014, Florida drew the line. It has a law saying that it is illegal in any school to:

“Collect, obtain, or retain information on the political affiliation, voting history, religious affiliation, or biometric information of a student, a parent or sibling of the student. For purposes of this subsection, the term ‘biometric information’ means information collected from the electronic measurement or evaluation of any physical or behavioral characteristics that are attributable to a single person, including fingerprint characteristics, hand characteristics, eye characteristics, vocal characteristics, and any other physical characteristics used for the purpose of electronically identifying that person with a high degree of certainty. Examples of biometric information include, but are not limited to, a fingerprint or hand scan, a retina or iris scan, a voice print, or a facial geometry scan.”


The educational achievement of children in Florida has not been hampered by that and the schools there continue, so it does not have to be like this. We can step back from allowing technology to lead the debate. We can step back from children being normalised into their bodies being used to access school services, and we can move forward with asking where we, as a country, draw the line, and bring forward legislation to show that there is a line. I suggest that the line is the use of biometric technology in schools on young people.